Dropbox: the first Dead Decacorn

Very interesting post trying to predict what will be the first dead ‘Decacorn’ ie. the first $10 Billion dollar company to flop:

The article highlights the fact that it is not ‘direct competitors’ that are going to make these companies dinosaurs, but rather companies that come out of left field. In this case, they highlight Slack as the company likely to make Dropbox a dinosaur.

Imagine … how the landscape of ‘unicorns’ will change once the structure of the Internet itself is redesigned. There are going to be many more names added to this list : )

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I love the way every company in that picture could get replaced by safe net. The whole damn stack! :slight_smile:

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Slack is not a great tool and I’ve been probably been using it for longer than that youngster.

It is a knowledge blackhole (unless you pay enough so that they can be your Dropbox of sorts) that doesn’t scale: the more users you have, the less useful it becomes.

Dropbox might die, but not from Slack. Slack will die before Dropbox.

I could switch to Gitter (or any other similar service, they’re dime a dozen) now and wouldn’t miss Slack. I could switch to Google Drive or something else (actually I use it for certain things), but Dropbox is much nicer (as long as I don’t pay for GD and Dropbox, I prefer Dropbox).

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I think it’s a good point, I am not in agreement either that Slack will be the tool that takes down Dropbox, although I don’t agree with you that Slack will die before Dropbox. Too many people are sick of working between email + file sharing solution, Slack is the first platform to gain mainstream traction globally with a good hybrid product.

I just agree with the key point in the article:

I’m pretty sure Dropbox’s multi-billion dollar valuation isn’t an anticipation of this new reality – it’s simply a projection of our current world, played in fast-forward. This is gravely shortsighted.”

All these multi-billion dollar valuations are based on the current system being scaled exponentially into the future, and the market size growing at the rates of Internet and mobile penetration. Putting big new innovations into the mix will change everything. I certainly don’t consider Slack a major innovation, just a good product. All the stuff around blockchain, cryptocurrency and decentral data is breakthrough IMO, which is what makes SAFE so exciting.

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Your judgement is imho way too general to be fair. Slack and its predecessors (Google Wave, Rizzoma) are a massive enhancement of conventional forms of digital communication. Out of the box Slack is a great tool for small startups, but it´s mainly a good tool to work in teams - there is absolutely no need to use it with the whole enterprise. (Disclaimer: I don´t use Slack, only HipChat)

All in all I must say I find these “X will die from Y” discussions pretty childish. They wouldn´t if they´d call some timeframes and facts, but obviously they don´t, bit like astrology.

SAFE alone won´t replace any of these companies. Another company will have to write an intuitive alternative to them. On top of awesome tech you need awesome design and user integration. Some humble tribute to successful forerunners from the perspective of a project that doesn´t even exist kinda makes sense.

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Very well said.

That’s why to me we are at the beginning of a new phase, in ‘tech,’ rather than just a new cycle. It’s not about who is the next Facebook, Dropbox or whatever, but who is going to reshape the market fundamentally. The market is ready for breakthrough innovation at all levels.

From a current market perspective, it looks like all the major companies (FB, GOOG, etc) are at a market top, based on valuations multiples and stock prices. Startups are similarly being overvalued simply because if they are successful they are likely to be bought out by those companies at astounding multiples.

It seems like the future market will be much more horizontal/decentralized and have a multitude of companies building on top of one another to create waves of innovation.

I wouldn’t want to be investing in Dropbox or any of the other big tech firms here, but instead in companies like SAFE who are trying to pioneer a part of the market.

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I agree to an extent.

Much of why these services provide is part of the core protocol (storage, messaging, hosting), but I agree that you need killer interfaces layered on top to make them accessible.

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I use Slack about 2 hours a day and I don’t find it to be much of enhancement, but people have different requirements and needs so it’s impossible to generalize (I attempted to do that just because the blog statement was generalizing - to make an evenly generalized statement).

For smaller teams I find Skype better because in smaller slacks I always subscribe to all the channels in any case.
The only (for my use case scenario) part where Slack is superior is that it can do markdown formatting (same as Gitter), but Skype can do voice and desktop sharing which with Slack you need to have find elsewhere. Depending on what users need, one may be more suitable than any other.

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Agreed. Use case is always relevant to selection of best tool for the job. These arguments seem to be about the best overall tool, ignoring that context matters.

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